Mercentile Madness - Roundup.

Its about two months since my last post in this series. In that time, I've had precious little chance to work on my two "Newbie" servers.

I did manage to catch up with Ideale/Ahami on VeCo and had some fun showing off the scenery in southern Tanaris. Traceabull my hunter was only level 22 or so and proved to be an absolute magnet for aggro in Tanaris. One thing I did notice is that hunters have a large advantage vs almost any other class when fighting much higher level monsters. Spellcasters find it nearly impossible to fight anyone 5 levels above them due to their primary attacks being resisted nearly all the time. I took a 29 warlock with some guildies into SM recently and could barely contribute at all due to this. Previous adventures with my rogue have shown that his melee attacks are also heavily penalised against higher level monsters, to the point where he would be lucky to hit for 5-6 damage each attack. Hunter's melee and special shots seem to suffer from this reduction also... but not so their white-damage autoshots. Traceabull was hitting the level 45-50 mobs in southern Tanaris for reasonably respectable 30-40 hits a shot, about what he does on same-level targets. These guys are 20 levels above him! This may partly explain why hunters are so good at taking on mobs a couple of levels above their own whereas other classes are not so lucky. Even warlocks in the mid-20's struggle more than hunters do.

After the sight-seeing trip was done, we hearthed out. I met up with Ideale's druid alt and her housemate's priest, to whom I gave some enchants with the crappy mats I had available. Hopefully they made a bit of difference. I do have better enchants available if you want, ladies... just give me a chance to scrounge some mats.

Ideale was a "bad friend" and hadn't supplied a wand, so when one turned up later while I was questing I gave that to the priest as well. The two girls were busy finishing off their quests and I was off elsewhere doing my own for a bit too, though we remained in a party to facilitate chat for a while longer. I burned through the rest of my rested experience then switched over to Changeabull my druid for a bit.

Changeabull had a fairly full quest log so spent some time handing in. Once that was manageable again, he visited the auction house. Between the two characters I now have quite an inventory of stuff for sale though little spare cash on hand. Much of the money I do make is spent on obtaining cheap items for disenchantment. Some of this is still being absorbed leveling enchanting on Traceabull; he's nearly maxed it for his current level. Any of the lower level materials are returned for auction and are starting to generate decent funds.

Over a couple of days I spent several hours trawling through the AH, finding cheap stuff and disenchanting it, then using or reselling the materials. I also spent about 150 gold in market manipulation.

There was a mid level enchanting material that was in quite large supply. I bought out virtually the entire stock, leaving only a handful of very overpriced suppliers in the market. I actually then consumed probably 80% of that stock levelling up enchanting. The remaining materials were then listed back on the AH at a price higher than average but still undercutting the market. Since this was still the weekend peak, most of my stock has since moved at those inflated prices and I've made nearly all my money back using only 20% of the stock! I do have some more of the same material, since several people tried to undercut my inflated price, but I've bought them out and re-listed.

There is a second, quite expensive, enchanting material that I now have significant stock in. It has not been as successful an investment and I had several 48-hour auctions expire. Luckily I need these to continue levelling my skill anyway so it won't matter much.

I also sacrificed an unused hunter alt on a "normal" US server. I found some random guy in razor hill and gave him all my stuff before suiciding that character. I then returned to VeCo and saw the birth of "Replaceabull", a Tauren shammy. He's had a little help from his bigger brothers and is motoring along nicely at level 6.

I've also found some time to visit Cael. I got distracted by my alts on the horde side when I should have been looking after the alliance guys. Nevertheless, I've managed to boost both warlock and hunter to level 21 and have done some more market and enchanting work. Unfortunately, the friends from Dath who were playing here have more or less abandoned their characters so some of my motivation to continue has gone. I am still feeling uneasy having both Horde and Alliance on the same server... its just wrong. Anyway, once I've done a few more market scans here and rebuilt my prices, I'll hit that auction house fairly hard while casually levelling the characters.

On Dath, most of my time has been spent in various instances. I've managed about 10 levels on some of my lower alts but have done little work on Crypt, despite a fair bit of encouragement from friends and guildies. I've been very busy with work so by the time I get on wow I'm interested in instant gratification that I can get by quickly levelling an alt.

I did take Crypto in as tank to Scholomance with two level 60-ish shammies from my guild and a warlock and hunter from the LFG channel. We did mostly ok. One wipe happened early when our healer went afk (unavoidably) and was then feared right into the middle of the room pulling a truckload of mobs. We wiped again later when I made a spectacularly bad pull that somehow managed to drag two extra groups of mobs, who then aggroed a few more on their way over to beat me into a pulp. We had several more individual party deaths when I either lost aggro, or didn't gain it in the first place - rogues are not designed to tank! Once people got used to the unusual group composition though, things went well. I also ran Crypt through RFC dragging along a level 11 guildie. A full clear in 20 minutes isn't bad! (Yes, this completely goes against my "runthus are evil" policy, but he'd already been in with an unsuccessful group earlier so I took pity on him.)